


Impermanent Space

by riptheh



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen, The Time War, eight just needs a quiet moment, idek what this is, yaz and the doctor have a convo in an airport
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-06
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-11-25 15:31:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20914394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riptheh/pseuds/riptheh
Summary: The Eighth Doctor has an unlikely conversation in an airport.





	Impermanent Space

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly dont know what this is, I was supposed to write thasmin rip
> 
> also i've never written eight before, forgive me if i have sinned

It’s three a.m. and the terminal is nearly deserted, for which the Doctor can only be thankful. He’s been to many places in his long life, but an airport in a pocket universe in New York is not one of them, and so far he’s not keen on the experience. There are too many people, and too little at the same time, and everything is disturbingly normal, and he doesn’t know what to do with that, so he ignores it all. Instead, he sits legs splayed with an elbow planted on each knee, hands cradling a forehead sunk low. He could probably expend the extra effort to sit up, look less like a drunk and more like a respectable citizen, but—well, _expend_ is the key word.

He’s never been much for respectable, anyway.

He knows he looks quite a sight, and if he didn’t, he could have read it off the faces of the occasional passer-by. They all give him glances, sometimes a sniff of disgust to which, when he has the strength, he responds with a sniff of his own. _Americans_. Specifically, traveling Americans. The worst of the lot, if he’d be inclined to rank.

At the moment, he’s not inclined to do much but sit. It’s a relief, rankled only by the strange nakedness that comes with being stranded. He hasn’t been without the TARDIS in—oh, who knows how long? Too long, that’s for sure. Certainly since the start of the war. Brax had given him a stern talking-to about it when he’d first joined the ranks, to which he’d only half-listened.

“Listen, brother,” Brax had told him sternly, after noticing for the third time that the Doctor had most definitely not been listening. “You can’t ride into battle on that heap of junk. It’s barely holding together as is, and—”

“She.”

Brax pulled up short. “What?”

“She,” the Doctor reminded with only slightly-strained joviality. There was a war going on, after all. “She’s a she, Brax. Don’t call her an it.”

Brax stared for two whole linear seconds, jaw hanging open. Then he snapped his jaw shut and colored a deep red. “Suppose you think you’ve gone native, have you?”

The Doctor responded with the barest hint of a shrug. At this, Brax deepened to a shade of—no, it was definitely magenta. Marvelous, really.

“Fine!” he blustered. He jabbed a finger at the TARDIS. “Well, Doctor, I can’t stop you from taking that heap of junk into battle, but I’ll remind you—this isn’t a war for the lesser species. Take that humanistic attitude into the war, and you’ll be stomped out just as quickly as the rest of them!”

Then he had turned and done his own stomping off, and the Doctor had watched him go with a bemusement that successfully blocked out his sense of dread. Sure, there was always that hint of regret that came with winding his brother up, but if watching Braxiatel’s fascinating range of facial hues distracted the Doctor from dwelling on unpleasant subjects such as the upcoming war—well, sacrifices had to be made.

And it was, he had to admit, rather fun.

Still, that was back when he had a TARDIS. He can’t help but miss her something dreadful, though strictly speaking, they’ve only been separated a few hours of linear time. It’s the linear time that gets him, though—it’s so bloody long. It’s not helped by the uncomfortable knowledge that he’s not actually sitting in the universe anymore, but rather a small bubble off to the side, one that will eventually pop.

In the universe—well, in the timeline he’d been warring over—Earth has long since been stomped out by the Zman’ra, a minor ally of the Daleks who, following their decimation of the Milky Way, were then quickly betrayed and fired upon by the Daleks themselves. That timeline in itself is only one of many he’d been trying to tie into something resembling victory—if anything of the sort can exist this far into the war—but he’d dropped it all to tow a nasty black hole over the heads of a Dalek squadron because, well, he’d been feeling like _revenge_. Unfortunately, he hadn’t counted on a stray shot from a neighboring skirmishing timeline to blast both himself and the TARDIS out of the universe.

The TARDIS—clever girl that she was—had managed to hook onto one of those safe little leftovers, like tiny bubbles floating up from a soapy bath, and toss herself inside. Unfortunately, she’d tossed herself and the Doctor on opposite sides of the world.

Now, sitting in an almost-empty airport terminal, with no ship and no shoes—he hadn’t realized he was supposed to take them back at security—he can’t help but feel uneasy. Of course, he’d rather have the ship than the shoes, but that’s a moot point; the only reason he’s sitting here at all is because he has no ship. Time Lords, in general, don’t need air travel. They especially don’t need large, maze-like American airports with confusing wall signs and flights that are meant to take off at midnight and instead get delayed to six in the morning.

There’s a particular feeling to being in an airport terminal in the middle of the night, he’s come to realize, and it’s not one he likes. Or rather, maybe it’s not the airport itself, but rather the entire pocket universe he’s sitting in, this little extraneous Earth caught in a bubble on the outskirts of the war, destined to disintegrate in who-knows-how-long.

That’s what they do, these extra little pieces. They float off from the bigger timelines, the ones already destroyed or already not, and they drift along until they’ve nothing to hold them together, and then they _pop!_ out of existence, taking everything inside them with it.

Which is why he’s not particularly keen on striking up conversation.

The Doctor shifts in his seat and grimaces at the large digital clock on the wall. Red LED numbers read 3:17, and as he watches, the 17 slowly flips to an 18. Linear time. How novel. He hasn’t sat through a linear minute since—oh, since the start of the war, probably. Not much useful fighting to be done one second after the other. You want to get the jump on the Daleks, you have to be one second ahead. Always.

The Doctor watches the clock a few seconds longer, feels each one slide past, then sighs and shifts his gaze. This time, he catches the snooty look of a passing business man, who eyes his outfit distastefully. The Doctor glances at himself, frowns—it’s only a _little_ singed—and decides in return to eye the business man who, startled at this reaction, picks up his pace and hurries by.

“He seemed a bit of a prick, didn’t he?”

The Doctor jumps. Then he turns.

There’s a girl sitting next to him, wearing a bright smile and dark hair done up in an intricate braid. It takes him a second to translate—_English_, bloody hard language without the translation circuits—and then he smiles tentatively in return.

“Sorry, who are you?”

Her grin turns slightly embarrassed. “Sorry, didn’t mean to be intrusive. I’m Yasmin, or Yaz, suppose you can call me. Least, my friends call me that. I was just noticing how everybody was giving you looks and—”

She drops off, shrugs. “Didn’t seem nice to be sitting alone, everybody giving you the side-eye.”

She bites her lip nervously as she says this, as if expecting him to wave his arms and dash her away. He doesn’t. Instead, he just surveys her for a moment, trying to gauge. Humans. He used to be so good at figuring them out. Now it seems he’s gone native in the opposite direction.

She looks, he thinks, about eighteen or so, not really a girl but not old enough to be properly grown up—a student maybe, or a soon-to-be. Probably off to see the world before university. She looks like she could be the type.

“Are you a traveler, Yasmin?” he asks.

“Yaz,” she corrects him. “And not really. I’m just visiting me nan on my dad’s side before I go off to police training. Gonna be a police officer.”

She grins, excited, and he tries to hide his grimace. Police. One step off from soldiering, and that’s bad enough. She doesn’t really have that air about her, the policing or the soldiering, but he’s old enough to know that very few actually do from the start. It’s built into them, bit by bit, assembly style fashion. Take the fresh-faced youths, shove them through training, or physio-psychic rewiring, and spit them out automatons. Goose-stepping into battle.

The girl has no time-sense about her, but he pictures her anyway as a fresh young Time Lord, ill-fitting in her first war regeneration. It’s not hard; youth seeps off of her, as it does with every one of them, even those that have been artificially hardened for battle. It’s the eyes, the Doctor knows, to watch out for. The eyes betray everything they haven’t seen.

He doesn’t realize he’s gazing off into the distance until the girl—Yaz?—waves a hand in front of his face.

“Sir?” she asks. Uncertainty open on her face. “Are you okay? I mean, I was gonna ask, you looked a little—”

She pauses, sweeps her gaze over his general appearance. He knows he’s in dire need of a shower and a shave, some first aid, but he quickly plasters a smile on his face anyway.

“Sorry about that,” he tells her. “Lost in my thoughts. I’ve had a long day.”

That’s not actually true—_linearly_—but then again, he’s never been one to get caught on technicalities.

“Yeah, I can see that.” Again, her eyes pass over his appearance. “Hope you don’t mind me asking, but—are you okay?”

“Okay?” the Doctor repeats. Again, it takes him just a tad too long to parse the meaning—bloody _English_—so Yaz says it again.

“Yeah, okay. You look like you’ve had a bit of a time.” She eyes him uneasily, but he’s no longer paying attention. Instead, for the first time in a long while, he actually thinks about it.

Okay. Is he? It’s a bit hard to sum up the meaning in one word. Okay implies a sense of rightness, of—mental health. Peace, maybe. He’s not really sure.

“You know, Yaz,” he tells her truthfully, “I haven’t really thought about it.”

“Oh.” Yaz clearly doesn’t know what to make of this. She bites her lip again—must be a nervous habit—then says, “Do you want to talk about it? My mum always says talking about things is the best way to get them out.”

She hesitates, then adds, “And if I’m being honest, you looked a little sad, just sittin here. Which is why I came over, I guess. Thought I’d make conversation.”

She glances down as she admits this, as if unsure if it was the right thing to say. The Doctor doesn’t immediately respond. He simply looks at her.

“You know,” he says after a moment. “It’s not normal social convention to speak to strangers.”

He’s not sure why he says that. Testing, maybe. A little wary. He is safe, for all intents and purposes, in this little bubble universe, this in-between space, but that doesn’t mean he can’t be careful.

But Yaz just smiles, broad and innocent.

“You know,” she says. “I think that’s the thing about airports. Like if I were on the bus, I wouldn’t be coming up to a stranger, yeah? But in an airport, once you get through security and everything, it’s sort—separate. Like its own little world. I think that makes it special. Plus, I’m sort of dying to know what happened to your shoes.”

She points to his stocking feet and his gaze follows. Then he frowns. “You know, I think security took them. I didn’t really ask.”

Yaz laughs, and the Doctor briefly flashes back to the young soldiers he used to lead, their smiles and laughter before they dissolved into subdued silence. Then he gives a slight shake of his head, and shoves the image away.

“Yaz,” he says. “I think you’re right about airports. It’s an in-between space, isn’t it? A rest stop, you could say.”

Yaz thinks this over for a moment. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right. I mean, you see all sorts in airports. And they’re all just passing through.”

“So am I,” he points out, then hesitates. “Well, I suppose we all have to move on eventually. That’s the nature of places like these. They’re impermanent.”

And he realizes, a beat later, that he’s not necessarily talking about the airport. But Yaz just shrugs, undeterred.

“Sure,” she says. “But you know, the in-between isn’t so bad. ‘Specially if you make conversation.”

She gives him a grin as she says this, the kind which suggests that she’s already decided they’re going to sit and talk. Whether he wants to or not.

For a moment, the Doctor toys with being stubborn. It would be easy to give her the cold shoulder, to turn around and ignore any further prodding. After all, this girl is impermanent. This world is impermanent. It’ll dissolve soon, like all the bubbles in the bath.

The Doctor considers this, as he watches Yaz smile, friendly and patient. He wonders if it’ll make much of a difference, to have a conversation. Probably, it won’t at all.

“Well,” he says after a long, deliberative moment. “I suppose it can’t hurt.”


End file.
